Stephen Kearon and "that" €3250 bill for hosting a website

Stephen Kearon - a Fianna Fail member - at the same time as calling for spending cuts, was outed for charging€3250 for a year's hosting of ONE website. When it's a government site (Dick Roche's) you can get away with this - despite calls for "spending cuts".

Stephen Kearon, PRO for Fianna Fáil‘s Wicklow CC, former Special Adviser to Minister Dick Roche, and Technical Director in Oltech Office Logics Ltd, earns between €55,000 and €75,000 a year, according to The Journal. He also thinks there should be more spending cuts, but not more tax increases. His personal website is kearon.ie - if you want more detail.

At the same time as call for more spending cuts, Gavin Sheridan of thestory.ie, uncovered a receipt for €3250 for hosting a website for a year. The website was Dick Roche's. Anyone who knows anything about web design and web hosting knows this is a lot of money - unless the site has extremely technical security requirements. One wonders at the irony of a Fianna Fail member calling for spending cuts at the same time as the coming to light of his charging €3250 for a website which was presumably put in as expenses by Dick Roche, and thus paid for by the tax payer.

In the run up to the general election, Twitter was alight (at least for a weekend) with the story, led by @brianmlucey and others. Despite many calls for a clarification of it, Stephen Kearon (@skearon) made no comment. He did block @brianmlucey from his twitter page, however.

This culminated with someone setting up stephenkearon.net and hosting it, spending less than €25. The site is still up as an archive of some of the events.

After almost 100% uptime and massive traffic, this site still hasn’t cost more than the 25 bucks or so it cost to set it up. As there has been no sign of Stephen whatsoever, extensive testing has been carried out and we can confirm that it is accessible from all corneres of the internet. In the interests of getting some feedback from concerned parties, we’ve decided to publish a picture of Dick Roche, for whom Stephen worked as an adviser. If you see him on the campaign trail, feel free to a...